The National Council of Churches in the Civil Rights Movement Jacob Oertel

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The National Council of Churches in the Civil Rights Movement Jacob Oertel z.umn.edu/MURAJ We Come Late, Late We Come: The National Council of Churches in the Civil Rights Movement Jacob Oertel Abstract: The National Council of Churches (NCC) was established in 1950 as an ecumenical organization for Protestant churches across the United States to exchange dialogue and work together, especially in response to the Civil Rights Movement. Its leaders intended to use the moral authority held by churches in their communities to encourage white Americans to embrace integration and condemn racism. The NCC had several devoted leaders and members who achieved symbolic victories, like sending a delegation to the March on Washington, and tangible victories, like organizing Midwestern churchgoers to persuade their congressmen to pass the Civil Rights Act. These actions, while substantial, were overshadowed by inertia, inconsistent messaging, and ideological moderation throughout the organization’s majority white membership. These traits were due in large part to the NCC’s inability to reckon with white Protestantism’s long history of racism in the United States and made it hesitant to act and quick to abandon the struggle once the Black Power Movement rose to prominence in the 1970s. The NCC remains a poignant example of how an organization’s inability to recognize its own privileged standing in American society inevitably prevents it from dismantling the inequalities which granted it that standing in the first place, no matter its original intentions. 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week. - Common expression during 1950s and 1960s.1 The church, as a whole, insists on a divine mission and guidance and the indisputable possession of truth. Is there anything in the record of the church in America in regard to the Negro to prove this? There is not. If the treatment of the Negro by the Christian Church is called ‘divine,’ this is an attack on the conception of God more blasphemous than any which the church has always been so ready and eager to punish. - W.E.B. DuBois in a 1931 article in The Christian Century.2 1 Introduction on Washington, and the introduction of the Civil The Civil Rights Movement (CRM) Rights Act in Congress to rally and act on their impacted nearly every public aspect of American rhetoric. This hesitancy largely blunted what could life, although it took longer for its effects to spread have been a highly effective effort to lead the to some institutions than others. Churches were confused and apprehensive white Protestant among the first institutions to segregate and among populace towards a new age of racial equality by the last to integrate.3 As part of this heritage, the appealing to their most trusted authority: religion. enormous moral weight wielded by Protestant Scholarship churches in the United States was mostly devoted Scholars of white Protestantism during the to bolstering, rather than subverting the status quo Civil Rights Movement differ on the extent to racial hierarchy. As the pace, breadth, and which national and local prograessive religious influence of the Civil Rights Movement expanded, organizations influenced the attitudes of ordinary Southern churches, like all other segregated laypeople and politicians. However, they agree that institutions, realized that the “traditional Southern until the 1950s, the majority of Protestant leaders way of life” was becoming unsustainable and would either supported segregation and other forms of have to change (or at least appear to). In the face of racial oppression, or were so ineffectual and this inevitability, some white Protestant leaders gradualist that they made no lasting impact on the stepped up, either in their local communities or as status quo. Scholarly works analyzing the part of national religious organizations, to relationship between Protestantism and race only encourage their followers to abandon the old ways emerged in the 1960s.4 These were based more in and embrace integration, arguing not only that this sociology rather than history and were often was the moral, Christian, thing to do, but also written by worried religious scholars heeding warning that failure to act would mean Martin Luther King Jr.’s warning that history condemnation from history and from God. The would judge white Christians harshly for their National Council of Churches (NCC) was an inaction during that critical time and would leave a association of many of these white Protestant stain on the legacy of the religion.5 leaders who wanted to exert a positive force on These are among the primary sources from their constituents. However, they required the which I will draw. I am also indebted to Davis W. denunciations of black leaders in order to see Houck and David E. Dixon for their compilation of segregation as a moral issue and often required speeches and sermons by religious leaders spanning external prompts like Brown v Board, the March the Civil Rights Movement.6 Gayraud Wilmore _________________________________________ _________________________________________ 1 Stephen R. Haynes, The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-Ins and 4 T. B. Maston, Segregation and Desegregation: A Christian Approach (New the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation (New York: Oxford, 2012), York: Macmillan, 1959); Paul Ramsey, Christian Ethics and the Sit-In, (New 8. York: Association Press, 1961); Reimers, White Protestantism; Donald W. 2 David M. Reimers, White Protestantism and the Negro (New York: Oxford Shriver, The Unsilent South; Prophetic Preaching in Racial Crisis University Press, 1965), 180. (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1965). 3 Shelton H. Smith, In His Image, But...: Racism in Southern Religion, 5 Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," (August, 1963). 1780-1910 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1972), xii; Haynes, The Last https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Letter_Birmingham_Jail.pdf Segregated Hour, 8. 6 Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon, Rhetoric, Religion and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965 (Waco, Tex.:Baylor University Press, 2006). MURAJ • z.umn.edu/MURAJ 2 Volume 4 • Issue 6 and James Cone’s documentary history volume of attention to how Cold War fear of communism black theology has also been an held back integrationist Protestants.9 Stephen R. invaluable source.7 While I am unable to physically Haynes gave an in-depth look at the unique kneel- travel to the NCC archives at the Presbyterian in movement, in which outside activists forced Historical Society in Philadelphia, James Findlay, churches to reassess their own racial policies.10 discussed below, did a marvelous job synthesizing While this paper focuses specifically on the archival materials in his book. I have also found white Christianity, David Chappell highlighted the many newspaper articles about NCC activities and leadership role of black Christians, arguing that public statements by the NCC on online databases. prophetic, revivalist Christian traditions had an Only in the 1990s did a secular historical unparalleled impact on the success of the Civil scholarship emerge to engage with the actions of Rights Movement. Chappell described how civil white Protestants during the Civil Rights rights leaders, like Old Testament prophets, could Movement and to gauge their impact on the ever- stand aside from society and speak truth to power, shifting American racial landscape. James Findlay, regardless of what the dominant narrative of the whose history of the NCC this paper is indebted to, time demanded.11 Although less focused on conducted an extensive study on the changing religion, Jason Sokol gave compelling evidence of tactics and motivations of the NCC from its the lack of clarity of ordinary whites’ beliefs during foundation in 1950 to the end of the 1960s, finding the most tumultuous political time in their life and that white churches made marginal progress how influential the leanings of the religious leaders integrating on their own, even when provided with in their lives could be.12 Sandra K. Gill expounded compelling rhetoric and reasons to do so.8 He on this, using sociological studies to show how argued that they took concrete action only when white solidarity created a silence around the issue spurred to do so by the black-led movement, which of segregation, building up the inertia which threatened to leave them in the dust of history if progressive religious organizations struggled to they didn’t change. There is also a number of overcome.13 existing scholarly works that either analyze specific My paper will build on these works by religious civil rights activism outside the NCC or focusing on how southerners defined their own allow a broader view of Christianity’s role during whiteness in relation to rapidly shifting religious that time. Michael Friedland added another piece and political standards in a historical study of the of vital scholarship analyzing the factors pushing NCC. Specifically, I will show how mainstream and pulling religious nstitutions, giving special Protestant values have been changing since the _________________________________________ ________________________________________ 7 Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone, Black Theology: A Documentary 11 David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of History (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1979). Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 8 James F. Findlay, Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of 12 Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950–1970 (New York: Oxford Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). University Press, 1993). 13 Sandra K. Gill, “Recalling a Difficult Past: Whites’ Memories of 9 Michael B. Friedland, Lift Up Your Voice Like a Trumpet: White Clergy Birmingham,” Sociological Inquiry 82, no. 1 (2012): 29–48. https:// and the Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements, 1954–1973 (Chapel Hill: doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X.2011.00404.x. University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
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